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Today we woke us with grand dreams of getting on an 8 day cruise and disappearing into the sunset on our cruise ship...but allas the dream was not to be and so here we are still in Santa Cruz! Once we'd accepted the fact that our cruise was not going to happen we went to the Charles Darwin Visitor Centre to see the tortoise nursery, which they have there. First we felt obliged to go the visitors' centre where there's of information about how people are ruining the Galapagos and how the centre is picking up the pieces! They are currently working on eradicating goats, rats and fire ants from the islands, as people introduced these are they are now destroying the tortoises' habitats and putting other animals at risk. We then visited the tortoise nursery where they have lots of babies all with numbers on their backs and colours which correspond to which island they're from. Then we went to see Lonesome George who is the only on of his kind left and actually didn't look that lonely today as he chased (now a tortoise chase isn't exactly high speed but he was chasing with all his might) a female around the enclosure. We were able to get really close to the tortoises, which was cool, as they used to be people's pets before the centre rescued them. Quite why you'd want a tortoise the size of me in your house i don't know!
After seeing the tortoises and being made to feel suitably bad about the fact that we're destroying the entire earth we went to find a beach and do something mindless! We ended up taking endless photos of marine iguanas which were basking in the sun on the rocks and i even chased some crabs around until i got bored and decided they were better at running around on spikey rocks than me! When i got bored i dragged Simon off to the beach where we could snorkel (poor thing, i think he could have taken photos of iguanas all day)! Snorkelling was fun as it was really shallow so we were nose to nose with all the fish and when i put my feet onthe ground they all came round my toes to check me out!! There was even a sea lion asleep in a boat - i tried to wake him up by making sea lion noises but he wasn't fooled!!
Then this afternoon we stupidly decided to try again and organise a tour to some other islands. Instead we ended up getting our hopes up again and again for nothing as everything was booked and our chance of seeing anything here got smaller and smaller (it's a risk we knew we were taking by just getting a flight out here). We did however redeem ourselves this afternoon as we booked two more days diving, a tour round the highlands of Santa Cruz and a 2 day tour to Isabella, another island, the one with all the volcanoes! So today ended up a lot better than it started off and we have tortoises to add to our list of animals seen so far. Oh yeah... and this morning on the way to the Darwin centre we passed a fishing port and saw pelicans, herons and sea lions all fighting for scraps as the men gutted the fish. It was pretty gross actually as the sea lions ended up covered in blood but really cool too!!!
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